Bowling Truths

Michael Moores mocking

National Review Online, April 4, 2003, 2:30 p.m.

In the field of
mockumentary filmmaking, there are two giants. Rob Reiner created the
genre with his film This is Spinal Tap. Michael Moore has taken
the genre to an entirely different level, with Bowling for
Columbine. More by Kopel on
Michael Moore.

In 1984, This is Spinal Tap premiered as the world's first self-described "mockumentary."
The film purported to be a documentary of a heavy-metal band called
"Spinal Tap." In fact, there was no such band. No group had ever hit
the charts in the 1960s with a song called "Listen to the Flower
People." No rock drummer named John "Stumpy" Pepys had ever died in an
inexplicable gardening accident. No arena rock performance had ever
featured a pair of midgets dancing around an 18-inch replica of
Stonehenge.

Over the course of the movie, most viewers figured out that "Spinal
Tap" was not a real band. The realization often came somewhere between
the band's rocker "Big Bottom" ("I met her on Monday; it was my lucky
bun day") and the sensitive ballad "Lick My Love Pump."

Still, a substantial portion of the audience sat through the entire
film without ever realizing that the whole thing was a joke. They left
the theatre believing that there really was a band called Spinal Tap.
In response, the creators ended up producing a Spinal Tap MTV video,
and even a 1992 Spinal Tap "Reunion" tour. The stupidity of a fraction
of the audience had brought its own "reality" to life.

This is Spinal Tap is an excellent movie which was, unfortunately,
neglected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. No such
fate befell Bowling for Columbine. While only an unusually dim
minority believe that Tapis truth, Bowling for Columbine has seduced almost all of its audiences with its brazen mockumentary.

You can't really understand the artistic accomplishment of
This is Spinal Tapir you naively expect to find the album Smell the
Glove in your local music store. Likewise, you cannot understand
the brilliance of Bowling for Columbine if you actually believe
the purported facts in this mockumentary. For the benefit of the
overly credulous, let me summarize some of the "facts" in Bowling
for Columbine. Then, I will explain how Michael Moore demolishes
the pretensions of the audience and of elite cinematic opinion in a
way that has never before been accomplished.

FICTITIOUS "FACTS"

The introduction of Bowling is a purported clip from an NRA
documentary, announcing that the viewer is about to see a National
Rifle Association film. Obviously, Bowling is not an NRA film,
and so Moore makes it clear right at the beginning that Bowling is not a documentary (based on true facts), but rather a mockumentary
(based on fictitious "facts"). It's a humorous movie, but the biggest
joke is on the audience, which credulously accepts the "facts" in the
movie as if they were true.

The first
mockumentary "fact" is the title itself. The Columbine murderers were
enrolled in a high-school bowling class. After the NRA introduction,
the film begins on the morning of April 20, 1999, the day of the
Columbine murders. Narrator Moore announces that on that day, "Two
boys went bowling at six in the morning." This serves as a setup for a
later segment looking at the causes of Columbine, and arguing that
blaming violent video games (which the killers played obsessively) or
Marilyn Manson music (which the killers enjoyed) makes no more sense
than blaming bowling.

In fact, the
two killers ditched bowling class on the day of the murders. The
police investigation found that none of the students in the bowling
class that morning had seen the killers that day. The police report
was completed long before the release of Bowling for Columbine,
so the title itself is a deliberate falsehood. (I don't use the word
"lie" because the mockumentary genre allows for the use of invented
facts.)

After the April
20 lead-in, Bowling begins an examination of middle-American
gun culture, and indulges the bicoastal elite's snobbery toward
American gun owners.

We are taken to
the North County Bank in Michigan, which  like several other banks in
the United States  allows people who buy a Certificate of Deposit to
receive their interest in the form of a rifle or shotgun. (The
depositor thereby receives the full value of the interest immediately,
rather than over a term of years.)

Moore goes
through the process of buying the CD and answering questions for the
federal Form 4473 registration sheet. Although a bank employee makes a
brief reference to a "background check," the audience never sees the
process whereby the bank requires Moore to produce photo
identification, then contacts the FBI for a criminal records check on
Moore, before he is allowed to take possession of the rifle.

So the audience
is left with a smug sense of the pro-gun bank's folly. Yet just a
moment's reflection shows that there is not the slightest danger. To
take possession of the gun, the depositor must give the bank thousands
of dollars (an unlikely way to start a robbery). He must then produce
photo identification (thus making it all but certain that the robber
would be identified and caught), spend at least a half hour at the
bank (thereby allowing many people to see and identify him), and
undergo an FBI background check (which would reveal criminal
convictions disqualifying most of the people inclined to bank
robbery). A would-be robber could far more easily buy a handgun for a
few hundred dollars on the black market, with no identification
required.

The genius of
Bowling for Columbines that the movie does not explicitly
make these obvious points about the safety of the North County Bank's
program. Rather, the audience is simply encouraged to laugh along with
Moore's apparent mockery of the bank, without realizing that the joke
is on them for seeing danger where none exists. This theme is
developed throughout the film.

From the
Michigan bank, Moore moves on to an examination of the rest of
Michigan's culture  or, more precisely, to eccentric and
unrepresentative segments of that culture, thereby playing to the
audience's feelings of superiority over American gun owners.

For example, hunting is a challenging sport, requiring outdoor skills,
wildlife knowledge, patience, and good marksmanship. Most members of
the urban audiences cheering Bowling for Columbine are no more
capable of participating in a successful hunt than they are of
conducting a three-day, backcountry cross-country ski trek, or playing
rookie-league baseball. The vast majority of hunters are also very
safety-conscious.
In 2000, for example, there were 91 fatal hunting accidents in all
of North America, within a
population of over 16 million hunters.

Yet Moore
ignores all of this. Instead, he comically reports an incident in
which some reckless hunters tied a gun to their dog to take a funny
picture, and one of the hunters was shot. According to the police
reports, the foolish hunters had only a still camera, but Bowling
presents a fabricated video clip which purports to have been filmed by
the hunter's friend. Because the clip appears to be a home movie, Bowling
makes hunters seem viciously callous: The "hunter" holding
the camera continues recording after his fellow hunter has been
wounded, rather than immediately stopping to help the friend.

Similarly, the
ideology of gun ownership and civil liberty is not presented by
reference to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, or to legal scholars
such as liberal Democrats Sanford Levinson or Larry Tribe. Instead,
Moore goes to the Michigan
Militia.

While Moore
allows the militia members to present their case, he makes the group
(which has no record of illegal violence or any other illegal
activity) appear extremely dangerous by informing viewers that Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols attended militia meetings. Moore
conveniently neglects to mention that the two were eventually kicked
out, for talking about violence.

James Nichols,
the brother of a convicted mass murderer, is offered as a spokesman
for the right of free people to resist tyrannical government.

ON TO LITTLETON, LOCKHEED, AND 9/11

Bowling then departs Michigan and heads for Littleton, Colo.,
to develop the thesis that American militarism created the mass-murder
atmosphere that resulted in Columbine.

Aerospace
contractor Lockheed Martin has a factory in Littleton, so Moore asks a
company spokesman if "our kids say to themselves, 'Well, gee, Dad goes
off to the factory every day, and he builds missiles, he builds
weapons of mass destruction. What's the difference between that mass
destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?'"
The camera then takes a shot of a workplace safety slogan  "It has to
be foreign-object free"  to imply that Lockheed Martin employees
revel in the killing of dehumanized foreigners.

Of course the
connection is nonsense. While one killer's father once served in the
Air Force, neither family worked in the defense industry. The other
killer's parents were gun-control advocates  so much so that they
forbade him to play with toy guns  unlike the many children who are
shown with toy guns elsewhere in the film. One of the killers' gun
suppliers was the son of a Colorado anti-gun activist. Thus, Moore
might just as well have asked a spokesman for a gun-prohibition group
if "our kids say to themselves, 'Well, gee, mom and day say that guns
are just for killing innocent people. So if I have a gun, I guess I
should use it for killing innocent people.'"

Moore returns
to the bowling theme a few scenes later, to present the argument 
which the audience of course supports  that neither bowling nor
Marilyn Manson was responsible for the Columbine crimes. The audience
is encouraged to feel intellectually superior to the politicians, who
are pictured blaming Marilyn Manson.

Yet the
connection the movie draws between Lockheed and the Columbine mass
murder is even more tenuous than the connection with Manson. The
Columbine killers had no connection to Lockheed, but they did listen
to Marilyn Manson. And
Brian Warner's choice of the stage name of "Manson" shows that
mass killers can enjoy enduring pop-culture fame  precisely what the
Columbine killers hoped to achieve. (I avoid mentioning their names so
as not to assist their vicious quest.)

After blaming
Lockheed for 13 deaths at Columbine, the film moves on to blaming the
United States government for 3,000 deaths on September 11. It does
this by arguing that we got what we deserved, because our nation
revels in the killing of civilians by air.

A montage of
U.S. foreign-policy atrocities (to the tune of "What a Wonderful
World") concludes with the statement that the U.S. gave $245 million
to the Taliban in 2000-01. The next shot is of the World Trade Center
in flames.

Right after the
footage of the airplanes hitting the Twin Towers, Bowling shows
a B-52 memorial at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Moore
intones: "The plaque underneath it proudly proclaims that this plane
killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve 1972." The point is obvious:
that the United States government and al Qaeda both perpetrate murder
by airplane.

In fact, the
plaque on the B-52 at the AFA is not as Moore describes it. The plaque
says "B-52D Stratofortress. 'Diamond Lil.' Dedicated to the men and
women of the Strategic Air Command who flew and maintained the B-52D
throughout its 26-year history in the command. Aircraft 55-083, with
over 15,000 flying hours, is one of two B-52Ds credited with a
confirmed MIG kill during the Vietnam Conflict Flying out of U-Tapao
Royal Thai Naval Airfield in southern Thailand, the crew of 'Diamond
Lil' shot down a MIG northeast of Hanoi during 'Linebacker II' action
on Christmas Eve, 1972."

Moore thus
confirms the absurdity of the blame-America-first position popular
among the Hollywood Left, by showing that such views require the
ignoring of obvious facts  such as the difference between financial
aid to a dictatorship and humanitarian aid to refugees, or between
fighting enemy pilots and perpetrating war crimes against civilians.

BLAME IT ON THE NRA

A long mockumentary segment reports on the NRA convention in Denver in
May 1999. The segment begins with NRA president Charlton Heston
holding an antique rifle above his head and delivering the signature
line: "From my cold dead hands." Actually, Heston never displayed a
rifle or uttered that line at the Denver convention.

Moore bashes
the NRA for being insensitive by holding its convention in Denver two
weeks after the Columbine murders. That insensitivity is heightened by
the implication that Heston did the "cold dead hands" rifle display
there. Viewers are not informed that the NRA convention had been
scheduled many years in advance, that Mayor Webb (who at the last
minute told the NRA to cancel the convention) had eagerly solicited
the NRA convention for Denver, or that the NRA drastically reduced its
four-day convention, holding only its annual members' meeting, in an
afternoon session legally required by its non-profit charter from the
state of New York.

The litany of
scapegoating (Lockheed Martin, the United States, the NRA) then
abruptly shifts into the anti-scapegoating segments concerning bowling
and Marilyn Manson.

In keeping with
the mockumentary format, Moore tells the audience that bowling was
"apparently the last thing they did before the massacre." Even if the
killers hadn't skipped class, this statement would be untrue. Bowling
class was at 6 A.M.; the killings began around 11 A.M.

The "scapegoat
Lockheed and the NRA" segments serve as a perfect counterpoint to the
"don't scapegoat bowling or Manson" segment. By leading the audience
into fatuous scapegoating of Lockheed and the NRA, the film
demonstrates the pervasiveness of scapegoating  even by people who
denounce it.

A cartoon
history of the United States comes next, on the theme that American
gun owners are racist. The Second Amendment is said to have been
written "so every white man could keep his gun." Actually, at the time
of the Second Amendment, every state allowed free people of color to
own guns. Moreover, anti-slavery activist
Lysander Spooner would later use the Second Amendment as part of
his argument to show that slavery was unconstitutional. Gun
prohibition, he argued, is a condition of slavery; the Second
Amendment guarantees the right of all people to own guns; hence
slavery, and its attendant gun prohibition, are unconstitutional.

The audience is
now informed that the National Rifle Association was founded in 1871,
"the same year the Klan became an illegal terrorist organization." The
voice-over says that this was just a coincidence, but the cartoon
shows gun owners helping Klansmen to murder blacks.

The phrasing of
the Klan line leaves some viewers with the impression that the Klan
was created in 1871, even though the group was founded in 1866 in
Tennessee. What happened in 1871 was congressional passage of the Ku
Klux Klan Act, which allowed the president to suppress the Klan by
denying Klansmen the writ of habeas corpus. (The Klan was, of course,
composed of men who fought on the losing, pro-slavery side of the
Civil War.)

President
Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 into law, and
worked for the rapid extermination of that terrorist organization.
Grant dispatched federal troops into South Carolina, Louisiana, and
Florida to destroy the Klan and to protect black voting rights. In an
April 1872 report to Congress, Grant pointed out the continuing
problem in some southern counties of the Ku Klux Klan attempting "to
deprive colored citizens of their right to bear arms and the right of
a free ballot."

President Grant
also signed the Enforcement Act of 1870, which made it a federal crime
for the Ku Klux Klan or similar conspiracies to interfere with the
civil rights of freedmen  including their Second Amendment right to
arms.

Frederick
Douglass justly called Grant "the benefactor of an enslaved and
despised race, a race who will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of
his name, fame and great services."

The 1871
founders of the National Rifle Association were thus diametrically
opposed to the Confederates who founded the KKK. The NRA founders were
Union officers who had fought on the winning, anti-slavery side of the
Civil War. Dismayed by the poor quality of Union marksmanship during
the war, the NRA's founders aimed to improve the shooting skills of
the American public at large. The first NRA president was Ambrose E.
Burnside, who had served as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Ulysses Grant
left the presidency in 1877, but continued his long career of public
service in retirement. In 1883, he was elected president of the
National Rifle Association. From 1871 until the end of the century,
nine of the NRA's ten presidents had fought against slavery during the
Civil War. These included Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, a hero of
Gettysburg, and Gen. Phillip Sheridan, the famous Union cavalry
commander. During Reconstruction, Gen. Sheridan served as military
governor of Louisiana and Texas, and removed hundreds of local
officials (including the governors of both states, and the chief
justice of the Texas supreme court) from office for failing to respect
the rights of freedmen and for failing to enforce laws for their
protection.

In Bowling, Michael Moore brags that he is an NRA "Lifetime member." So it might
be expected that Moore would inform viewers about the NRA's noble
anti-slavery history. But Moore's connection to the NRA is bizarre; he
told Tim Russert that he joined the group so that he could be elected
its president and make it support gun control. This is aggrandized
self-delusion, rather like Barbra Streisand announcing that she was
becoming Catholic so that she could be elected Pope and make the
Church support polygamy.

The supposedly
racist nature of white gun owners is reinforced by Bowling's
statement that an 1871 law made it illegal for blacks to own guns. No
such law existed, although it is true that many gun laws from the late
19th century  such as licensing and registration laws, or bans on
inexpensive guns  were selectively enforced in the South
so as to deprive blacks of firearms. These are the same kinds of
laws that Moore promotes today. Indeed, he turned the Bowling for Columbine
premier into a fundraiser for the Brady Campaign, which
works hard to outlaw inexpensive guns used by poor people for
protection.

MEDIA FEAR-MONGERING

Having established the racism and paranoia of American gun owners,
Moore now begins an extended sequence depicting the media as racist
fear-mongers. He first argues that the media create irrational fears
about black criminals. (According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports,
table 43, 4,238 blacks were arrested for murder and non-negligent
manslaughter, compared to 4,231 whites.)

University of
Southern California Professor Barry Glassner, author of The Culture
of Fear, gets lots of camera time to explain how the media
sensationalize crime and hype fears to unrealistic levels. And this is
where Bowling's genius truly shines.

On the one
hand, Bowling works the audience into self-righteous anger at
"the media" for using cheap sensationalism to promote fear. At the
very same time, the film uses  you guessed it  cheap sensationalism
to promote fear. The very techniques which he decries in the media,
Moore uses himself, with obvious approval from the audience. Moore
thus enacts a real demonstration of how the audience is itself
complicit in the cycle of fear.

Moore
criticizes weakly researched media stories that scare people over
nothing (such as phony stories about razors in Halloween apples), but
at the same time, his own factual claims are either invented or taken
grossly out of context.

For instance,
Moore lets Glassner criticize the media for sharply increasing
coverage of homicides during a period when the actual homicide rate
was falling. Yet his own frantic film about the terrible dangers of
American gun violence comes even as gun crime rates have fallen
sharply from their early 1990s levels.

Glassner's book
points out that an American schoolchild is much more likely to be
killed by lightning than in a school shooting. Yet Moore's film rests
on the premise that the Columbine shooting represents an American
epidemic of violence.

Even while
denouncing Americans for being so afraid of violent crime, Bowling for
Columbine works hard to make them still more afraid.

The audience
accepts Moore's cinematic fear-mongering  while congratulating itself
for being too sophisticated to fall for media fear-mongering. So even
as Bowling offers its audience the superficial social
satisfaction of being less media-malleable than the rubes who are
presented as typical Americans, the audience nevertheless falls for
sensationalistic media exploitation. The L.A. Weekly noted the
"tabloid" nature of Moore's film, and the film's tawdry use of cheap
emotion and cheap shots could indeed serve as a model for an aspiring
tabloid television producer.

Accordingly,
the smug audience of Bowling is degraded not merely to the
level of ordinary gullible Americans who buy into the fear-mongering
on the evening news, but still further  to the trash-news level of
people who are easily manipulated by tabloid media.

Thus, Bowling turns the audience's very pleasure in watching the movie
into a deconstruction of the audience's blue-state social pretensions.
The Bowling audience is every bit as ignorant and fearful as
the audience for Inside Edition.

Moore's
technique is that of turning an audience's acceptance of a work's
superficial message into a much deeper message which critiques the
audience itself. Thus, Bowling for Columbine makes the audience
complicit in its own delegitimization and degradation. Most of the
audience, of course, never "gets" the real point.

Moore's clever
techniques of inversion reach an apogee with the Willie Horton ad.
Political historians will remember that in the 1988 Democratic
primaries, candidate Al Gore criticized Gov. Michael Dukakis for a
Massachusetts furlough program under which Willie Horton  who was
serving a murder sentence of life without parole  was given a weekend
furlough, and raped a woman. During the fall campaign, the pro-Bush
National Security Political Action Committee ran a Willie Horton
commercial.

The official
Bush campaign ran its own advertisement, "Revolving
Doors," which attacked the furlough program but did not mention
Willie Horton.

But Moore
pastes text from the National Security PAC ad over film from the Bush
commercial, thus creating the impression that Bush invoked Willie
Horton. Moore falsifies the advertisement by pasting onscreen the
text: "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." This libels Willie
Horton, who perpetrated a rape but not a murder during his furlough.
The audience already knows that it is supposed to be angry about the
Willie Horton ad, because it was unfair and because it politically
seduced gullible Americans. So Bowling does a "Willie Horton"
of its own on the audience, making the film's version of the ad into a
falsehood and so turning the audience into dupes of a Willie Horton ad
 just like the 1988 dupes of the original ad. For good measure, the
ad makes the audience believe that a black man is guilty of a crime he
never committed; Bowling thereby perpetrates the same
manipulation of racial fears which it accuses the media of
perpetrating.

OH, CANADA!

After over an hour spent on the horrors of the United States, Moore
switches to the peaceful society of Canada. He begins by arguing that
Canada and the United States are very similar  except that Canada has
a generous welfare state, and no culture of fear.

It's true that
Canada does have a lot of guns compared to England or Japan, but
Canada's per-capita gun ownership rate is about a third of the
American level.

Moore films the
over-the-counter purchase, no questions asked, of some ammunition in a
Canadian store. The Canadian government has pointed out that such a
transaction would be illegal, since the buyer is required to present
identification. Moore did not respond to a request from the
government's Canadian Firearms Centre to explain whether he staged a
fake purchase, edited out the ID request, or broke the law.

Moore then
tells the audience that 13 percent of the Canadian population is
minority ethnic, the same as in the U.S. Actually, it's about 31
percent in the U.S. More significantly, blacks and Hispanics, who are
involved in well over 50 percent of American homicides (both as
victims and as perpetrators) make up about 2.5 percent of the Canadian
population. In the United States, each group makes up about one-eighth
of the U.S. population.

Comparing U.S.
gun-death totals with Canada's, Moore offers a U.S. total that
includes death by legal intervention (e.g., a violent felon being shot
by a police officer) while omitting this same category from the
Canadian total.

We return to
Flint, Mich., for a long segment on Kayla Rowland, a six-year-old girl
who was fatally shot in school by a male classmate the same age. Moore
blames Michigan's requirement that welfare recipients work at a job.
Because the killer's mother, Tamarla Owens, commuted to work in a
shopping mall 70 hours a week, and because she still could not pay her
rent, she was about to be evicted. She thus moved in with her brother,
and then her unsupervised son found a handgun, brought it to school,
and killed Kayla Rowland.

Actually, Owens
earned $7.85 an hour from one job ($1,250 a month, almost entirely
tax-free), plus at least the minimum wage from her second job, and
received food stamps and medical care. Her rent was $300 a month.
Michigan had rent-subsidy and child-care programs too, but Owens
apparently did not know about them. So, contrary to the impression
created by Moore, Michigan's welfare-to-work program is generous: Even
without the rent subsidy, Owens earned more than enough to pay the
rent. Perhaps Owens's caseworker should have told her about the
available subsidies, but the caseworker's mistake hardly means that
the Michigan system is the Dickensian horror portrayed by Moore.

Moore tells the
audience that Ms. Owens and her son were living with Owens's brother.
He doesn't tell the audience that their home was a crack house, or
that the stolen gun was received by the brother from one of his
customers, in exchange for drugs.

"No one knew
why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl," says Moore.
Actually, the killer was the class bully; said that he hated everyone
at school; had been suspended for stabbing a child with a pencil; and,
subsequent to the shooting, stabbed another child with a knife.

We now get a
quick cut to Charlton Heston speaking at a gun-rights rally in Flint,
holding a rifle above his head. Moore explains that Heston came to
Flint after Rowland was killed. Later, when interviewing Heston, Moore
tells him, "You go to these places after they have these horrible
tragedies." There's a considerable distortion here. Kayla Rowland was
killed on February 29, 2000. Heston appeared at a Bush campaign rally
in Flint over half a year later, in mid October.

Moore told Phil
Donahue that "The American media wants to pump you full of fear." And
that's just what Moore himself does, terrifying and angering his
audience about American gun owners, George Bush, American media,
American foreign policy, American welfare policy, the National Rifle
Association, and the American character. The theme of the movie could
well be encapsulated by D. H. Lawrence's claim that "The essential
American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

Bowling for Columbine revels in the tabloid-style, raw exploitation of emotion
 in promotion of unjustified fear, in falsehoods and quarter-truths,
in oversimplification of the problems of race, and in mean-spirited
pandering to the audience's bigotry about people of different social
backgrounds.

In this way, Bowling subverts its own audience. To participate in Bowling's
emotional journey is to surrender to the very same mendacious hate-
and fear-mongering that the movie purports to criticize. Liking Bowling for
Columbines no different from liking the sleaziest
"news" show on television, except that the audience for the latter
doesn't claim to be more aesthetically  or morally  sophisticated
than the mainstream American public.

Bowling also subverts elite Hollywood opinion. Imagine if the Academy gave the
award for "Best Music  Original Song" to a film that used an
unoriginal song, such as "Jingle Bells." Such an award would show that
the Oscars are based on Hollywood politics rather than on artistic
merit. The presentation of Best Documentary to Michael Moore for a
film based on so much untruth has proved the same thing.

Some readers
may doubt that Moore intentionally created an entire film whose
subtext so thoroughly contradicts its literal text and that so
effectively mocks its audience and its creator. My response is that we
are long past the era of being chained to an artist's precise
intentions. Georgia O'Keefe is said to have denied that her flower
drawings were evocative of female genitalia. Does that mean we should
pretend that O'Keefe paintings are not overflowing with female
genitalia?

The fact is
that a mockumentary larded with untruths and brazen self-contradiction
is gobbling up documentary prizes: a special award at the Cannes Film
Festival, the National Board of Review's "Best Documentary," the
International Documentary Association's choice for best documentary
ever, and the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Countless
actors and producers may have railed at the Academy for poor taste,
but no artist has ever demonstrated the film elite's hyper-partisan
preference for political correctness over truth as thoroughly and well
as has Michael Moore.

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